Introducing Nanobyte

Introduction

Hello. I’m very excited to announce Nanobyte. Nanobyte is a new way to pay for things online with Nano. We’ve designed Nanobyte with one thing in mind, to make the payment flow as effortless as possible. We aim to bring the utter joy and frictionless nature of sending a Nano transaction to the payments industry. I’m sure many reading this today know what I am talking about when I use the word joy. Maybe you are lucky and haven’t had to experience the pains associated with traditional cryptocurrency transactions. For the rest of us, we had to attempt the feats of mental gymnastics necessary to figure out how much of a fee we needed to include in our transaction. We experienced the beads of sweat that would often accompany the minute to hour-long waits. The obsessive and frantic double and triple checking to ensure we entered the correct address. The constant tapping of f5 of the block explorer or exchange deposit page, hoping and praying that we didn’t make a very costly mistake.

Nano flipped this experience on its head. Waving goodbye to transaction times and fees, we could send transactions without the stress and the cost. It is indeed a joy to send a Nano transaction. The delight is palpable when you look at the wallet you just sent to and see the completed transaction there before you can blink.

Nanobyte aims to manifest this experience in payments. No more data entry. No more QR codes. No more addresses.

Nanobyte is a browser wallet for Nano designed solely with this one purpose in mind. To make paying for things online as easy as possible.

Story

I have always been a lazy man at heart. I look for the quickest and most convenient way to do things. When it comes to online payments, even having to fill out my information and put my card details in bothers me. First, my wallet would always somehow be somewhere other than where I was, so I would have to go on a mission to find it. Then I would take the card out, fill out all my details, only to then find that sometimes the card didn’t work. I would then have to go through the process again with another card crossing my fingers and hoping that it would go through this time.

PayPal changed a lot of things for me. I didn’t have to go and get my wallet for one. And it was reasonably quick to go through the payment flow screens. A significant improvement from using my cards. However, as a centralised system, PayPal became the judge and jury of its financial ecosystem. There are countless horror stories of accounts being frozen and fraudulent actors getting away with their crimes. I experienced this first hand when I sold my Runescape account, only to have the money disappear after delivery, with PayPal doing nothing about it.

Now, living in the Netherlands, the online payment industry is dominated by a payment processor called iDeal. iDeal lets you pay directly from your bank account after scanning a QR code from your banking app. So when I decide I want to buy something, I have to go through the following process:

It’s pretty good, but it’s not the best it can be.

The payment flow looks very similar when paying for something with Nano. You can substitute the banking app for a Nano wallet here. You might even have to copy and paste the address and enter the amount if you’re using a desktop wallet. The payment itself happens instantly.

Pretty damn good for a cryptocurrency payment, but it’s not the best it can be.

What if it was possible to combine the ease of use that you get with an express checkout system like PayPal, the security, peace of mind, and low barrier of entry that comes with a traditional banking app like iDeal, and the instant and free nature of sending a transaction through Nano?

That is something I want to see in the world.

What is Nanobyte and how does it work?

Nanobyte is a browser extension that hides all of the complexity that comes with using cryptocurrencies. You can probably describe it best as the love child of PayPal and Metamask.

Merchants create an account on the Nanobyte website and integrate Nanobyte into their website. They place a button, like the one right here, wherever they want to take a payment.

When that button is pressed the extension opens a popup asking the user to confirm the payment.

Once the user confirms the payment. The website is informed that the payment has been successfully received and releases the goods/services they have paid for.

Here is a short video where I demonstrate buying a giftcard with Nanobyte.

Just the beginning

Every great journey starts the same way — with the first few steps. We must do things the right way and not try to get ahead of ourselves. Therefore we are launching with a couple of merchants. Our very own https://redeemfor.me and https://nerch.co If you want to check Nanobyte out, you can go over there and purchase a gift card for yourself or a friend and experience how great a payment flow can be.

A real obstacle that we see to widescale cryptocurrency adoption is simply that it’s hard to use. It has a high barrier of entry and generally a terrible user experience for non-technical users. Nanobyte aims to change that.

For that, there are many challenges we need to overcome and features we need to implement. Our primary focus for the immediate future is:

• On/Off ramping
• Merchant adoption

You can contact me on Twitter @mackcee or email me at charlie@nanobytepay.com. Feel free to join our discord if you want to provide feedback or be more involved with the community. You can also learn more about Nanobyte through our website.

Until next time.

Charlie